| That's because Intel (back then, the only real high-perf CPU) rejected ARM as an inferior, slow technology. And blatantly ahistorical on "money": where is your citation? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=gross-... In 2005 to 2008: Intel made 2x to 6x more profit per quarter than Apple. A short example: Q4 2005 at Intel: $24b profits
Q4 2005 at Apple: $4b profits Not revenue. Not stock price. Profit, that can be put anywhere in the business. Intel had insanely higher profits than Apple. The iPod (which ran an ARM-derived 90MHz CPU) was already out in 2008. Apple had just acquired P.A. Semi. Intel still had vastly, vastly, vastly more free cash flow and profit. Don't tell me Intel didn't have money for Arm or hiring CPU architects or even literally acquiring entire Arm firms. Intel had hired these very people who later joined Apple; it absorbed Arm architects, uarches, designers, portfolios, etc. They failed. As The Register wrote in 2006, >Intel's failure wasn't for a lack of talent or investment - or even luck - over the years. Intel threw $1.6bn on a DSP company in 1999, and followed up with a host of smaller investments. And luck blessed Intel on several occasions. When DEC's StrongARM processor fell into Intel's hands in the fall of 1997, it was as a result of a legal settlement, and an unsought and unexpected prize. Pundits at the time thought that Intel had been handed the keys to the kingdom. But billions of dollars later, Intel could only claim two significant design wins from lower tier phone OEMs RIM and Palm. Texas Instruments, by contrast, will cash $14bn in revenue from phone chip sales this year.
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>So how did Intel fail to capitalize? In a nutshell, it failed to live up to its name. Intel may stand for 'INTegrated ELectronics', but it failed to integrate the electronics that mattered when it mattered.
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>A series of poor management decisions ensured that StrongARM was well positioned for a market that was on the decline, and rarely competitive in a market that boomed. Early on, Intel decided against integrating dedicated digital signal processing into the StrongARM chip, later renamed XScale. While this decision was justifiable for fixed embedded markets and for PDAs, it put the chip at a huge disadvantage for lower cost devices that needed voice capabilities. In response, Intel copied the PC strategy of adding new floating point instructions, introducing MMX for Xscale. Since phone manufacturers preferred cheaper custom chips for devices that needed a multimedia flip, this was a wasted investment. Good reading:
https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/28/intel_mobile_failure/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240049543/Intels-Strong... |